Bryan Windmill Research

The first thing I did when I got it home was to open it up. What I found was a gearbox full of red dried mud. The wasps must have made a nest in there at one time. So the first stage was to get the high pressure washer on it and give it a clean-up. It all looked pretty good at first glance but I could see some signs of wear on the mast pipe, and an obvious broken piece of cast iron that was the very top lid.

I really wanted to be able to rebuild this windmill and get it back into commission pumping water from a dam up to a header tank on the top of a hill that feeds the stock troughs for the cows. Then when full to overflow into a pipe that would feed small ponds above the dam a water the trees in this area. This job is currently done with a petrol powered water transfer pump a Davey fire fighter.

In its present state I had some parts and didn't know how they all fitted together and worked. I had a feeling I didn't have all the parts and even though it said Bryan Bros on the tail vane there was no guarantee that the tail vane was for this gearbox. So I started to do some looking on the web like everybody does these days and found a great resource in the The Morawa District Historical Societyhttp://members.westnet.com.au/caladenia/index.html I sent an email off to their contact on the website and got a reply the same night a few emails back and forth and it looked like we had it identified. This was mainly due to a privately owned windmill park in Shepparton by Theo Cook. I was sent some pictures that Theo had given to the Historical Society and it looked like we had a match with a few discrepancies.